The noise that things make is something the Swedish furniture designer and founder of Quiet design carefully considers.

By the time she graduated from her Masters degree in 2007, she had her first piece in production. The project was an attempt to redesign the two noisiest products in furniture design – a tubular steel chair and a laminate table, and make them almost entirely silent. The result was the Silent Whisper table and the Quiet Chair.

Silent Whisper was picked up by the Swedish manufacturer Materia and has been a quiet revolution on the design scene. The table is engineered in such a way that it cuts noise by half. Through its innovative material combination and vibration dampening construction technique, Silent Whisper stops noise from occurring in the first place, rather than absorbing it. Strömgren created around 50 different material combinations and measured the sound level for each, before settling on the final formula. The formula is patented and the table received the Red Dot Design Award in 2008.

It was an internship that sparked Strömgren´s interest in noise. In 2004, she took a year out from her design studies, but instead of getting a job in a design studio she did an internship with noise researchers at a lab. She made a research study in schools, where the high sound levels was making the staff ill. She noticed that none of the furniture was designed to reduce noise, instead the teachers created self made solutions, adding materials to the existing furniture trying to fight the noise.

Since then, noise-reduction has been a starting point for most of her designs. ”For me, it´s important that the sound-reducing element is a built-in function, not an afterthought,” explains Strömgren.